We too found nicegear's pricing a bit excessive while looking for an Atcom PBX and Grandstream phones, ended up buying GXP-2010 phones from http://www.voipstuff.co.nz/ and had an Atcom line card shipped from the US for about half the local price.

I am aware the Grandstream pricing is out of date, it should be updated this week. We don't deal with Grandstream phones a whole lot so our prices on those may be darer than others. Other brands should be more competitive.

When comparing to overseas prices you do need to take into account shipping, GST, customs fees etc. As well as local stock and support. Of course if you purchase something small such as line card you may slip under the radar and save some money.

If you would like to discuss anything in particular then please feel free to contact me (Hadley) through the website.

It depends what sort of phones you're after. As a level entry phone I recommend any the Linksys SPA series (but the 9xx are now obsolete and replaced with the 5xx series), Polycom IP3xx range or Aastra handsets. I've also heard some good things about the Thomson 2030's but have not personally played with one.

Price is very much a subjective thing - I consider ~$200 up to be the price for a level entry handset. I would also personally never go near Grandstream gear but many people love it, some because they're simply not used better equipment so are not aware of how poor their gear really is.

lokeynz: We too found nicegear's pricing a bit excessive while looking for an Atcom PBX and Grandstream phones, ended up buying GXP-2010 phones from http://www.voipstuff.co.nz/ and had an Atcom line card shipped from the US for about half the local price.

We ordered 6, had one DOA, voipstuff had a replacement to us the next day.The system has been running solid for the last month... not sure whether they've got their bad rep from older firmware versions or the older gxp-2000's but these seem fine so far.

We wanted functionality similar to the keyphone system it was replacing so needed the BLF keys, Linksys and the like didn't fit the bill.

lokeynz: We ordered 6, had one DOA, voipstuff had a replacement to us the next day.The system has been running solid for the last month... not sure whether they've got their bad rep from older firmware versions or the older gxp-2000's but these seem fine so far.

We wanted functionality similar to the keyphone system it was replacing so needed the BLF keys, Linksys and the like didn't fit the bill.

Grandstream phones got a horrible reputation because of their build, performance and firmware quality. If you don't remember this you haven't been playing with VoIP stuff for long enough!

Linksys phones support BLF fulctionality, you ovbiously just have to buy one of the handsets that features lamps, the SPA5xx series does up to 12.

We used a Grandstream phone for some time and found it to be well built & reliable, indeed it was the phone preferred by my staff, probably related to the feel & use of the dial buttons.

I only disposed of to standardise on two brands of phone, Level1 VOI7000 and the Thompson 2030, both the Level 1 & the Thompson seem quite good, the only downside with Thompson is that the display is not back-lit.

Personally I had so many bad experiences with Linksys I would never again buy one of their phones, although I do accept that many people have had good experiences with them

They are good phones but were hurt by a dodgy firmware upgrade that came out in December that has recently been fixed.

There are two things I dislike - the screensaver takes the first keypress to disable it so if this is active and you try to dial a number it will use the first digit to disable the screensaver which can be annoying. The VM notifcation is also slightly annoying, both missed calls and VM's are indicated by a flashing LED and you then have to press this and scroll to a menu that lists VM's and missed calls.